Event #69 - Members' Lightning Talks
13 September 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson
Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
Registration info at http://oshug.org/event/69
We don't usually do a September meeting, but we thought it would be
interesting to hear from our members about the projects that they have
been working on over the year. We're delighted to welcome a range of
speakers who will spend 10 or 15 minutes discussing their projects.
This is a joint meeting with the British Computer Society Open Source
Specialist Group.
Hammerspoon: Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation
Hammerspoon exposes many parts of macOS to the simple scripting language
Lua. Its goal is to make the most powerful and flexible tool for serious
power users to automate and customise as many things as possible. In
this talk we'll look at the history of automation on Apple computers,
how Hammerspoon works, and some of the excellent things it can help you
do. Of course, it's Open Source, so you can also jump in and help make
it even better!
Chris Jones has been creating, using, and advocating for Open Source
software, since the mid-1990s. He's spent the last 12 years of his
professional life working on/with Open Source - the first half at
Canonical (creators of Ubuntu) and since then working on OpenStack at HP
and Red Hat.
After 13 years of zealously running only Linux on his desktops/laptops,
he has spent the last 8 years recovering as a macOS user, but has
nevertheless retained his passion for contributing to Open Source.
Cooking with a touch of science and a dash of engineering.
Sous vide (under vacuum) is a technique that places food into a
temperature controlled water bath. The vacuum bit isn't that important,
and squeezing the air out of a zip lock bag is generally sufficient; but
precise temperature control is essential to ensure that the right
proteins are denatured. The thermostat in a typical piece of kitchen
equipment is nowhere near good enough, but add a sensor (immersible
temperature gauge), an actuator (433MHz remote control socket), some
control software and a dev board to run it on and you have the ability
to cook perfect steaks, eggs, fish or whatever.
Chris Swan has been tinkering with electronics since he was a small
child, and got into software when he realised that it was necessary to
make hardware do interesting things. In his day job as CTO for Global
Delivery for DXC Technology he's bringing a large services company and
its customers into a world of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code. On
evenings and weekends he can often be found making some sort of project
around a dev board, with a particular fondness for Raspberry Pis.
Building an Open Source Electric Surfboard
With the increasing availability of 3D printers and the wide variety of
components available over the internet, how hard is it to build an
electric surfboard? This talk will cover the design and construction of
an open-source electric surfboard from the concept to hitting the sea,
including some of the challenges met along the way, especially those to
do with managing lots of electricity very close to lots of water. The
project can be found on GitHub at
https://github.com/largeostrich/openelectricsurfboard and
https://github.com/largeostrich/openwaterjet.
Peter Bennett is currently studying Mining Engineering at Camborne
School of Mines, University of Exeter. He has a long standing interest
in open source technology, particularly 3D printing and electronics. He
previously reimagined peripherals for the EDSAC using 3D printing and
arduino for ChipHack at Wuthering Bytes 2017.
Jumbo Servo - I2C position control
When Andy needed a really big servo, rather than spend a fortune on an
industrial monster, he decided to make one. As it would be used with a
Raspberry Pi or Microcontroller he decided it would be digitally
controlled rather than the usual analogue pwm.
Andy Clark has been Making and Repairing in a shed at the bottom of the
garden for the last 10 years. The code and designs for his often quirky
and enchanting projects can be found on GitHub and documented on the
Workshopshed blog.
Next Generation Storage Interfaces
The efficient, convenient, and robust execution of data-driven workflows
and enhanced data management are key for productive in computer-aided
RD&E. Still, the storage stack is based on the low-level POSIX I/O (or
objects in cloud storage). This talk introduces chances for establishing
an open community-driven next-generation storage interface in a similar
fashion to the existing forums. The forum would bring together vendors,
storage experts, and users to discuss key features of the API and
establish governance strategies. The envisioned coarse-grained API aims
to overcome current obstacles for highly parallel workflows but would be
beneficial also in the domain of big data and even desktop PC. It bears
the opportunity to create a new ecosystem.
Dr. Kunkel is a Lecturer at the Computer Science Department at the
University of Reading. Previously, he worked as postdoc in the research
department of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) that partners
with the Scientific Computing group at the Universität Hamburg. He
manages several research projects revolving around High-Performance
Computing and particularly high-performance storage. Julian became
interested in the topic of HPC storage in 2003, during his studies of
computer science. Besides his main goal to provide efficient and
performance-portable I/O, his HPC-related interests are: data reduction
techniques, performance analysis of parallel applications and parallel
I/O, management of cluster systems, cost-efficiency considerations, and
software engineering of scientific software.
Upspin: a personal storage and sharing system
Upspin tries to address the shortcomings of sharing, privacy, and
availability of data on the internet, in the modern day. Whether it's
making state available across multiple computers or sharing with other
parties, Upspin is a personal namespace which can accomodate and be
built upon.
Sevan Janiyan founder of Venture 37, which provides system
administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and
computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he
maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems
featuring PowerPC, SPARC and ARM CPUs.
A Plan 9 C Compiler for RISC-V
The Plan 9 operating system was developed at Bell Labs in the 1980s
using a new C compiler written by Ken Thompson, which was also later
used to implement the kernel of the Inferno operating system and to
bootstrap early releases of the Go language. Like Plan 9 itself, the
compiler is highly portable, elegantly minimalist, lightweight and
quick. The ARM version, for example, is about 21,000 lines of code and
compiles itself in 15 seconds on a Raspberry Pi 3. This talk will
describe the exercise of re-targeting the Plan 9 C compiler to generate
code for the RISC-V open instruction set architecture.
Dr Richard Miller learned C in 1977 while re-targeting (and re-hosting)
Dennis Ritchie's original Unix C compiler from the PDP-11 to the
Interdata 7/32. Since then he has re-targeted Unix and Plan 9 C
compilers for various other CPUs from NS 16032 to Nios II.
Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.